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Author Topic: wood gas?  (Read 2105 times)

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ThomasJ

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wood gas?
« on: April 26, 2012, 06:36:21 PM »
Is there anyone in BC Canada playing around with this?
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REdiculous

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Re: wood gas?
« Reply #1 on: April 28, 2012, 03:28:49 PM »
I'm not up there but I've played w/ wood gas a bit. What are you wanting to do with the gas?..just curious...

A couple cleaned out paint cans and some metal piping is all it takes to make a simple gasifier that'll produce a flame similar to a bunsen burner. It's a good place to start, I think, since you can bang one out in an hour w/ basic tools and it's not a big investment. You can control the gas flow w/ a wet towel around the condenser can and tubing -- it's not too hard to keep a fairly steady flame/temp that way, but it's not quite the same as a knob on burner.

I've been wanting to make one similar to that but a little bigger and more robust so I can install it in our woodstove. The wood box is larger than it needs to be and I think using some of that space to produce gas could be worthwhile, but it'd have to make enough gas to run an RV fridge, or similar.....and I'm not sure if I can do it and still get/afford fire insurance, so I may have to do it in the backyard and make a fancy BBQ pit / outdoor kitchen.

I think that's 2¢ worth...yeah...
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ThomasJ

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Re: wood gas?
« Reply #2 on: April 30, 2012, 02:05:05 PM »
what I was thinking was that I could run a back up generator off of wood gas. The wife and I have the dream of being totally self sufficient and making our land cost neutral or better and are working towards that goal.
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Kingfish

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Re: wood gas?
« Reply #3 on: August 02, 2012, 02:27:17 PM »
We are working towards the same thing. I want a working 120 volt generator that makes at least 20 amps of power running on wood gas.  I have looked at several companies selling them and they are expensive.  I have to choose wisely between solar, wind and wood gas here in Michigan. I have built a simple one using a paint can and copper tubing. The concept works great. I just have to scale it up to a level that will keep an engine running for 5 to 6 hours per charge. I may never get there as I feel time is running short for experimentation.
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independent

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Re: wood gas?
« Reply #4 on: August 02, 2012, 05:14:38 PM »
There are active email lists discussing wood-gas.

I looked into it awhile back. Have one of those small fan powered camping gasifiers. It works well.
Looked into a Chinese made gasifier with water cooling, big enough to run a decent gen-set. These are built for village sized gas cookers. Here is a write-up of an electrical generator conversion on the webs with the model I was looking at:
http://www.spaco.org/JXQ10A.htm

The syn-gas has a significant amount of gunk that needs to be scrubbed. There is moisture and tar, but people generate electricity and the guy who runs that webpage has datalogged his output.
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